For the longest time I was convinced blood and heritage were irrelevant. “You’re shaped by your surroundings and environment,” I thought, “by the people closest to you.” I was taken as a small baby from “the Far East,” and planted into a working class family in the northern countryside of Sweden. Was I not a malleable little sprout expected to adapt to my new environment seamlessly? However, regardless of how much I grew and my new roots dug into the Swedish soil, I was still so different from my Swedish family. Environment couldn’t explain how I developed such a distinct interest in the arts, music, and language when they weren’t mirrored in anyone that I knew while growing up. My parents stood rather clueless outside of my fantasy world built from drawings and paintings. I nurtured my creativity alone. When I started art school, I presented my detailed, small, and colorful watercolors, which were romantic looking, soft, and quiet. The teachers recommended that I try working with oil, that I work bigger and use bigger brushes. I learned that the images I grew up with were considered kitsch by the middle class. My mother’s wall was decorated with textiles embroidered with quotes praising the calm and quiet home, along with prints of farmers or workers dreaming of a day’s rest. All of this was embedded in my own paintings without me realizing it. Even if I tried, I couldn’t erase a visual language that was considered frivolous. This is a watercolor of me and my Swedish mother—burning debris in the yard, preparing for fall. Ornaments and romanticism aren’t what you associate contemporary painting with, but for my mother the romantic images she has at home are an expression of longing—a longing for less heavy work, dreaming of wealth when money is scarce, and wishing for good health and a nice safe home. That’s what I interpreted from the art I grew up with. I think it’s beautiful and honest, but it represents a world that few of my classmates were very familiar with. At the age of 19, I was reunited with my Korean family. I was surprised to find out that both my older sisters grew up with a strong creative urge. They used to write poems and painted when they were young. My father played a little bit of guitar. None of them got the opportunity to develop their skills further, but it had been there. I could see that my sister had the same personality as me, and that my angry face definitely came from my father. And yet, they were complete strangers to me. It was comforting knowing that even my artistic side did actually have roots, and that it came from somewhere and someone. It felt validating knowing it was a part of me, that it was something I had kept and cared for, and not something I had grabbed/added. After that, my Korean heritage started claiming more space in my art. Exoticized and ignorant in the beginning, but my art became more confident and educated as I grew. This is a watercolor and gouache portrait of me and my Korean mother, in her home in Busan. These days, I’m waiting to start a Ph.D. program in illustration in Stockholm. I will be the first one in my family and amongst my relatives to become a Ph.D. student. I’m going to write about and illustrate my adoptee experience and show through my work the interaction of upbringing, belonging, and heritage—a “betweenship” I believe many of us adoptees feel. My latest works of art have been a series of portraits of me with my Swedish and Korean families, portrayed in locations important to me, and painted in a way that is reminiscent of motifs that could be found in a Swedish countryside home. It is an homage to what I admire and love about the Swedish countryside, but it is an expression of sorrow and loss as well. Behind every international adoption is still the heartbreaking severing of a mother and her child. Cecilia Hei Mee Flumé was born in 1987 in Busan, South Korea, and raised in Umeå, Sweden. She got her B.A. in Art History and MA in Visual Communication in Stockholm. Cecilia now lives and works in Stockholm, and will soon start her Ph.D. in Illustration at Konstfack University. You can connect with Cecilia on Facebook. Cover photo credit: Jimmy Flumé

When I want comfort, I lean into rice. Congee, fried rice, or a bowl of white or brown rice and a sweet-savory lap cheong cooked on the surface of the rice grains. A plate of steaming hot rice with a fried egg on top. On this day in March, early on in the pandemic shutdown in California, I woke up worried about a family conflict that I had no ability to control, especially now. I also woke up knowing that I wanted breakfast before heading out for a walk. I decided to focus on breakfast. I microwaved some cold leftover rice in a little bowl. A rice bowl’s worth of food is really all the sustenance we need, I once read. I thought about how to season it. Furikake? The seaweed-y, sesame Japanese seasoning is something I just learned to use. Some of the spicy long beans with ground pork left over in the fridge? I had that for breakfast yesterday with a bowl of rice and topped with a sunny side up egg, edges all crisped up and lacy brown. Today, my breakfast is inspired by a memory of something I discovered as a child outside of my family’s home. In after school care, a San Francisco Unified School District program where I also went for summer day camp, ladies prepared food in a kitchen that would be served to us at lunch. Here, and at my regular school cafeteria, I learned about foods I never encountered at home, like roast chicken or meatloaf. I remember tasting white rice with butter on it for the first time at lunch on a pale green plastic plate. It was a revelation. We never had rice like that at home, grains covered in salty fatty goodness. We rarely used butter at all really. Occasionally, my mother would butter a piece of toast thickly and sprinkle granulated sugar over the top. It was good! Like cinnamon toast without the cinnamon. Pandemic brain wandering reminds me that I also had my first celery with peanut butter back in my elementary school days. Neither my grandmother nor my father served anything like that as snacks at home. At home, we sometimes had a kind of watery rice gruel that my grandmother would make with the little last bit of rice at the bottom of the pot. Or we’d have little biscuits that came individually wrapped in shiny cellophane packs, variations on water crackers with a richer crumb and sandwich filling. My favorites were filled with a light and sweet lemon cream. Sometimes, after he picked us up from school, my dad would swing us by a Chinese bakery where we’d get tall jee bow dan goh, their smooth brown tops covering a rich, feather-light sponge wrapped with thin white paper. Today, inspired by memory, I microwaved the leftover rice in a small bowl, and topped it with a thick pat of salted butter. I watched hungrily as the butter began melting into the hot rice grains. And then, impatient, I helped the process along by stirring the grains. I tasted it and added soy sauce. Tasted. Added a little more soy, and then a little sesame oil. Then, I added some chili oil. Finally, I topped it with chopped scallions. I was reminded of another dish, a favorite of mine as a child that was homey, soft, simple, direct. The version I had as a kid involved being served a mound of steaming hot rice, creating a well in the middle, cracking a whole raw egg into it, and then sprinkling soy sauce and sesame oil in the well before mixing the whole thing up with a set of chopsticks. The most seasoning we added was a bunch of ground black pepper. So simple, so delicious. It is what I need in these times—a little bit of comfort, food acting as a portal back to childhood, to a time when we all were still together—Mom, Dad, my brother, and me. Shirley is a Chinese-American writer of poetry and prose based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a two-time alum of the VONA/Voices workshop and a 2018 fellow in Kearny Street Workshop’s Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. Follow her on IG @shirligig and Twitter @shirlstyle. Cover photo credit: Shirley Huey

While it was natural for humidity to follow the torrential mid-morning rains, the afternoon air on this day was unusually thick. My jeans felt heavy and clung to my legs. I dragged two bulging nylon bags toward the bus station in Kisumu, hoping they wouldn’t tear, not caring about the mud. People trudged in all directions, engrossed in their own private game of avoidance—avoid mud puddles, especially the ones with rotting plastic bags; avoid street kids, especially the glue-sniffing gangs of boys; avoid stray animals, especially the mangy ones. Along the perimeter of waiting matatus, or Kenyan minibuses, stood a row of dukas, or stall-like shops, selling everything from mobile phones to sweaters to Coca-Cola. In front, women sat on small plastic stools, selling ears of corn right off the charcoal or samosas deep-fried on demand. My mouth watered at the smell. I longed for a hot cup of chai (sweetened milk tea), but the ride from Kisumu to Kapsabet would take two hours, and the last thing I wanted was to risk having to pee in a bush while 15 other passengers looked on. As I got closer to the lines of waiting matatus, touts waved and shouted, clamoring for my attention to buy their wares. It’s not that I was the only potential passenger, but I was the only potential foreign passenger—someone who might hand over two, three, or four times the correct fare out of ignorance, apathy, or sympathy. Hell, I might even tip. “Ssss-ssss, miss! Over here! Where are you going?” I hate it when they hiss at me, I thought. “Going to Nairobi, miss? We drive very fast! You will arrive very quickly!” Or dead. “Come, miss! I give you the best seat! Where are you going?” I had to chuckle. A best seat? In a matatu? “Please. Give me your bag. Let me help you.” Nope, not falling for that again! “Hey! Japanese! No? China lady? China lady, come here! Ching chong! Hello! You understand me?” My cheeks began to burn. A familiar mix of embarrassment and anger swelled up inside my chest. I clenched my jaw; my breath came hard and fast. “I understand you just fine, ufala! I speak English!” A group of men—boys, really—laughed hysterically. With a surge of adrenaline fueled by indignation, I lifted my bags high and walked quickly to the last line of matatus, the ones going north toward the city of Eldoret. Surprisingly, the tout said nothing as I handed him some shillings, threw my bags on the floor, and climbed inside. I was the last to board the 18-person van. Once I settled into my seat and it became clear just how much legroom was leftover, the tout whistled and motioned to someone. An old woman with a conspicuous overbite hobbled over and shoved a small cage next to my right foot. In it was a single chicken. Right. “Tuende, tuende!” (“Let’s go, let’s go!”) The tout shouted and hit the doorframe twice with his palm. The matatu began rolling forward while the tout stood in the mud counting the bills. A few seconds passed before he leaped into the side of the moving vehicle and slid the door shut. I reached for my seatbelt. Fuck! I thought. It’s broken. “Bwana!” I said. The tout looked at me. I pointed at the broken belt. He shook his head and made a noise—tsk tsk. I couldn’t tell whether he was sympathizing with me or shaming me, as if I’d broken it intentionally. Now, as a young, idealistic adventurer, I had no real concerns for my health and safety, but I did worry about my freedom. I worried that if the police searched our vehicle at a checkpoint, I’d be arrested and fined for not wearing a seatbelt. Seatbelts were always required by law, but it was enforced haphazardly, usually when the government was short on funds, and usually following a corruption scandal…which had just happened recently. I thought about this as we left Kisumu, a port city on the shores of Lake Victoria. We sped over flat, golden plains, and Kenyan hip-hop blared from the speakers. Strings of beads and a large silver cross swayed from the rearview mirror. Occasionally, we squealed to a stop to allow a passenger off or on, but before long, we were winding through the hills of the Nandi Forest, an area that tends to produce Kenya’s best marathon runners. Once through the Nandi Forest, the matatu slowed, gently this time, and everyone knew why: we were approaching a checkpoint. The tout slid the door open and shouted at the police officers, “Habari za mchana!” (“Good afternoon!”) Two officers, a man and a woman, said nothing but motioned to the driver to pull over. Large semi-automatic guns hung over their shoulders, and the man wore a sash of bullets. No one smiled. I could hardly breathe, and I quickly considered who I would call if I were arrested. My mental list became irrationally long as I tried not to think about the stories I’d heard from those who had already, at one time or another, been hauled off to a police station in this country. Peeing in communal buckets, overnights with no food, trading a bank account number for freedom. And then I got angry: Fucking matatu’s got a sub-woofer but no seatbelts. Idiots! The male officer poked his head in the back door. To each person not wearing a seatbelt, he pointed and barked, “Njoo hapa! Njoo hapa!” (“Come here! Come here!”) One by one, passengers—including me—climbed out of the matatu and stood by the side of the road. The female officer opened the back of the police wagon and motioned for people to start getting inside. I wondered how we were all going to fit. Surely they’d have to make at least two trips. Would it be better to be among the first or last? Should I take my bags? Would the chicken be alright, now that the cage had space to slide all over the floor as the matatu continued to its destination? Two older women began crying and speaking earnestly in Swahili to the female police officer. A young woman, my age perhaps, crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. Behind her, two men chatted as though they were simply colleagues in line for lunch. Another man clutched his mobile phone and, for whatever reason, a toothbrush. The officer ignored them all completely. Then after a minute, she shouted, “Excuse me!” I realized she was looking at me. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I closed it again and simply stared at her. “You!” She walked toward me, shouting in English. “Where are you from?” I hesitated. I didn’t want to say that I’m American. In that case, who knew how much I’d have to pay to be released from jail? News of American poverty, or even the middle-class, hadn’t yet reached rural Kenya. But I didn’t want to lie either. “Chinese lady?” she barked. I kept staring at her, not on purpose, I simply couldn’t move, or speak, or think. Her gun bounced off of her thigh as she walked. “You, Chinese lady,” she said again, a bit softer this time but nowhere near friendly. “You must wear a seatbelt! It’s the law! Do you understand me?” Still frozen, I said and did nothing. Then, she motioned for me to get back inside the waiting matatu. “Go!” she shouted. “Go on to wherever you’re going.” I stepped toward the minibus, trying not to appear too eager. “This mzungu doesn’t even speak English,” I heard her mutter, completely exasperated and to no one in particular. “How am I supposed to deal with that?” I sat down, this time in a seat with a working seatbelt. And this time, completely pleased with being called a China lady.

I am one of over 200,000 adoptees exported from Korea. Plunked down in Minnesota in the mid-seventies, my adoptive parents were told to “raise her like your own,” which translated to a “love sees no color” approach. My name was changed from Sei Myung Lee to Jennifer, the single most popular name for newborn girls in the U.S. from 1970 to 1984. This “love sees no color” attitude seemed like sage advice for the time; however, it did not account for the fact that even if love didn’t see color, people did. This colorblind approach led to the paradoxical experience of simultaneously being treated as another…and also an “other." Being raised as a transracial adoptee in a white family from the suburbs did not lend itself to much discussion about race, racism, or what it was like to be a Korean girl negotiating predominately white spaces. There were few places, if any, to describe my experiences and the fact that moving through the world was different for me than for my white, non-adopted peers and siblings. My attempts to describe these differences were met with a lack of understanding and my parents’ efforts to soothe me by ignoring and minimizing differences—the idea that a bounty of love would dilute the difficulty of navigating a racialized world, alone. Despite growing up in a white family and in white communities, my proximity to whiteness did not shield me from the reality that I was not white. Those around me controlled whether I was considered another (white) or an “other” (Asian). In a society that often views race through the binary lens of black and white, Asians are neither. I was either relegated to this invisible space or else took up my position as a perpetual foreigner. I grew comfortably uncomfortable residing on the spectrum of hyper-visibility and invisibility, moved along and between these poles as others chose to place me. My belonging was conditional. I was fully a part of my white family…until I was told that I could marry my brother…or my cousin because they were not my real family, and we were not related by blood. I was just one of the girls, until someone referenced “the chink” walking by and suddenly I was all alone despite the fact that I was smashed between several other teenage bodies. I learned that at any moment my racial identity could be relevant, although it was rarely recognized. This contributed to the sense that my experiences were as valid as a white person’s understanding and comfortability. My dual access to white privilege and model minority status, made my experiences, feelings, and the visceral happenings in my body difficult to identify and even harder to validate. I learned to keep my experiences private—to get small and be good, and to navigate the confusion on my own. Becoming a parent, myself, created an opportunity to think about race in a new way and to consider what it would mean to raise multi-racial children. Half Korean and a mix of French, Irish, English, and Polish, my boys would never check just one box in a category of racial identifiers, unless of course the one box generically identified them as “other.” I thought about the efforts my parents made to connect me to Korean culture. There was Korean camp. And bulgogi. And kimchi that no one liked. And Korean folk music that my mom played on car trips until my dad got a headache and had to turn it off. These efforts to connect me to my history meant something; however, without the context of language and cultural mirrors, it became a representation of all that had been disrupted. It is hard to describe the internal battle that surfaces each time I think about returning to the place of my birth. There is a notable tension, a push and pull. My birth country holds such tremendous power. It is the place of my beginnings, where my roots extend far beyond my own life, and that of my first family. These roots extend to generations of ancestors and a land that holds my history. The draw is unparalleled. At the same time there is a notable tension—a silent ask to the universe to help me transcend my midwestern upbringing so that I may be absorbed seamlessly back into the Motherland. This is confusing, yet over the years I have learned to live with this tension. It has become a familiar sensation—one that is lifted only when my feet are firmly planted on Korean soil and I am able to move freely within a sea of faces that mirror my own. When my children arrived, I wondered what it would look like to become the role model I had sought so desperately as my younger self. I am still figuring this out. What I know is that I want my boys to have the space, opportunity, and language to grapple with race and identity. I want their identity to be shaped by their own understanding and experiences, not by what others say it should be. I want them to be able to think critically about the explicit and implicit messages that they see and hear about who they are and where they fit, as well as the messages that they see and hear about who others are and where others fit. I want them to understand that identity is complex and evolving, and that they have the right to take up the space that they’re in—no matter what that looks like. In our house, we have ongoing conversations about difference. We discuss difference as it relates to race, but also as it relates to many other areas of identity and living. Our conversations are candid. They are truthful. Sometimes they are awkward and uncomfortable. I can’t say that I’m doing it right. What I can say, however, is that race and identity are complicated beasts, and I do not know how this process will unfold for my children. It may be a journey that is traveled with relative ease, or one that is marked by bumps and detours. Either way, I want them to know that their process is exactly what it should be—perfectly their own and up to them—where they are neither an other or another—just beautifully themselves.

As a person of color, it has been an extremely difficult time with rushes of varying emotions. Christian Cooper. George Floyd. As events unfolded, a friend and I spoke generally about racism in America, and I mentioned hate crimes against Asians due to COVID-19—the Brooklyn woman who had acid thrown on her, for example. My friend, whom I might add, is a highly educated, white American female, said, “It’s a shame this is happening now, when Asians have such a positive history in America.” I paused. The words model minority popped into my mind, followed by the disappointing realization that here was another person who wasn’t at all familiar with the Asian-American story. I can’t blame her too harshly, though. The long-standing institutional racism endured by Asians in America, particularly Chinese-Americans, is not a well-known story, even among other groups of racial and ethnic minorities. In a 2016 article, African American writer Brando Simeo Starkey wrote, “[Even] people like me who care deeply about racial justice—we often fail at positioning the grievances of Asian-Americans against white supremacy at the heart of the fight.” Yes—it does feel like the Asian-American story is written in sand, continually washed over and buried again and again. So, today, I’ll tell the story one more time, as well as answer the question you may be wondering right now: Why is it always forgotten? The History of Asians in America Large groups of Asians from China and Hong Kong first came to America in the mid-1800s, lured by the Gold Rush. However, fortune was rare, and most became laborers on the Transcontinental Railroad, which, by the government’s own admission, could not have been completed without the huge numbers of Chinese manpower. But, the Chinese were given the most dangerous jobs, subjected to physical and verbal abuse, and were paid a fraction of the salaries of their white counterparts. Cheap Chinese labor gave rise to “anti-coolie clubs,” which were essentially white unions that sought to protect the rights of white workers and maintain clear boundaries between the races. In 1862, these clubs successfully lobbied for a tax on Chinese labor, which became the Anti-Coolie Act. Working class whites continued to rally against Asian workers and their families, which, by this time, included immigrants from South, Central, and East Asia. Not only did whites perceive Asians as economic threats, but they also viewed them as cultural threats. Asians spoke differently, dressed differently, and were not easily converted to Christianity. As such, Asians were very much the target of social discrimination, and many died at the hands of angry lynch mobs. The worst such example is the Chinese Massacre of 1871, where 500 rioters hanged 15 Chinese men, shot three, and ransacked Chinese homes. Some historians cite this as the largest mass lynching in America’s history. Afterward, eight white men were convicted of manslaughter, but later the convictions were overthrown on legal technicalities—a phenomenon we’re still too familiar with today. Xenophobia fueled anti-Asian propaganda, and the exploitation of Asian workers continued. In the late 1800s, after the end of the Civil War, southern plantation owners replaced their freed black slaves with Chinese and Indian workers, yet the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred them from US citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first and only American law to exclude an entire group based on race. Throughout the early part of the 20th century, Asian people continued to move from the West to the East Coast and discrimination followed. All over America, Asian-American families lived in segregated neighborhoods. Many school boards, particularly in California, forced Asian children to attend segregated schools. Then came World War II. In response to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, nearly 120,000 Japanese people—most of whom were US residents but also included Japanese from Canada, Mexico, and South America—were forced into internment camps. Quite ironically, as U.S. troops fought against Hitler, the Japanese in America were sharing some experiences with the Jews in Europe. A concise summary on history.com reads, “The FBI rounded-up 1,291 Japanese and religious leaders, arresting them without evidence and freezing their assets.” Then, “In Lordsburg, New Mexico, internees were delivered by trains and marched two miles at night to the camp.” Internees included men, women, children, the elderly, and the disabled, whether one was fully ethnically Japanese, or merely a 16th Japanese, however that was determined. After World War II, things began to change for a number of reasons. There was a sense of appreciation for the tens of thousands of Asian people who fought with the US military during the war, and large groups of Southeast Asians were resettled in America. Immigration laws that prohibited or restricted various Asian ethnicities were dismantled, the last of which in the 1950s. But, it wasn’t simply shifting times that prompted a change in attitude towards Asian-Americans. The U.S. as a whole was changing rapidly, and white America turned its attention to other perceived threats. Model Minority: A Tool of White Oppression In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement fueled social and political tensions. White America looked for ways to maintain the status quo and, although not necessarily intentional, a “divide and conquer” mindset was born. White academics heralded Asians as the model minority—a term that was quickly picked up by the media and politicians alike. A popular quote from US News & World Report in 1966 read: “At a time when Americans are awash in worry over the plight of racial minorities, one such minority, the nation’s 300,000 Chinese-Americans, is winning wealth and respect by dint of its own hard work…not a welfare check.” Other analyses pointed to the Asian community’s full trust in government to make the best decisions for American society. Essentially, Asians were lauded for “working hard,” keeping their heads down, and doing what they were told to do. The implication for African Americans was: “If they can do it, why can’t you?” Suddenly, Asian-Americans were not the enemy, but a fine example of assimilation, upward mobility, and patriotism. White Americans flipped the narrative when it suited them to do so. In contempt for the African American community, and again, using its influence over government, education, and culture, white supremacy altered collective memories and attitudes. Power in Numbers It’s incredibly important to me that the Asian-American story is shared accurately and often—not simply because I’m an Asian-American woman, but because our story helps to provide a fuller picture of white supremacy in America. Whether Asian, black, brown, Native American, Muslim, or Latino, we each have a history. While the specific ways and means have differed, we all share the overarching experience of exploitation, oppression, violence, and institutional racism in America. Our collective stories are even more powerful than our single stories alone. Sources: Asian Americans Then and Now Cracking the Bamboo Ceiling Emil Guillermo: Asian Americans were lynched too–On Trump’s offensive lynching remark ‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks Polygamy, Prostitution, and the federalization of immigration law The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans Stop Pointing at Asian Americans to Downplay Racism at Universities